The Quantum Mechanical Argument For Essentialism

The Taoists have what they call "Five Element" theory with the fifth element being spirit or Chi which can be described as the undetectable flow within the empty void. Whether spirit or Chi exists is not something modern science can ever prove or disprove and everything ultimately being paradoxical means it should turn out to be impossible to determine whether causality can be defined as two or three dimensional and whether there are four or five fundamental forces. Claiming everything is either merely spiritual or physical is a metaphysical extreme. In yin-yang theory the metaphysical and spiritual are indivisible complimentary-opposites and the idea that you can define the spiritual entirely outside of the context of the physical or vice versa is just so much meaningless mystical metaphysical mumbo jumbo. If it has some personal meaning for the individual that's great, but it has no demonstrable meaning making it unscientific any standard.

The concept of Hilbert spaces is central to the mathematics of quantum mechanics simply by default that without a demonstrable explanation for the behavior of quanta whatever provides the most parsimonious explanation is simply more useful. Notably, quantum mechanics are also formulated in such a way that they also imply quanta can just as easily move backwards in time. The most parsimonious explanation for these anomolies in the math is simply that we are using nature to study nature and reaching the limits of human perception.

 

The problem is not finding ‘the’ answer, the problem is finding ‘an’ answer----enough of an answer that is also rational enough to bring philosophy back to life, and resolve the nihilism of the modern age----even if it only starts the process.

One problem with our Modern culture is that it lacks a unifying truth. We have a pseudo-truth in the form of consumerism, but we don’t have any actual truth, hence the growing nihilism. At the dawn of the New Age science was to be the new truth, replacing the church----but after two world wars and a cold war, it was obvious that classical science had failed as the new truth. The dilemma this creates is that history appears to support the theory that without a unifying truth, a culture breaks down.

The unifying truth is not the ultimate answer, otherwise it would never be replaced with a new truth. But it is a truth to the culture and the times that it serves. It gives meaning, value, and truth to the lives of the people it serves. We need to find our way back to defining a unifying truth to our culture.

You actually have a good point about metaphysical extremes. The Modern Age, particularly science, is trapped on one extreme---that of the physical. Following the example of Derrida’s deconstruction, I initially proposed the wave side of wave-particle duality as nonphysical as an attempt to deconstruct the physical side of wave-particle duality. Modern man has fallen so far into defining physicality as the dominant binary opposite of the duality, as Derrida would say, that he no longer has any concept of the nonphysical. So the process of deconstruction began with reintroducing the nonphysical to Modern Man, and then to actually make that as the dominant of the binary opposites. This would be followed by the destruction of the physical (as we shall see in a post I will write in the near future). But you already recognize in this a metaphysical extreme by making everything mind or spiritual. But being that they are binary opposites, the nonphysical as the new dominant side, or even, the ‘only’ side, is in itself subject to deconstruction back to the physical.

In a sense, I am faced with the problem that beset Heidegger. Following Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead, Heidegger saw the biggest problem in philosophy is to determine just what is ‘being.’ Modern Man had already been entrenched into physicality---that nothing but the physical existed. Nietzsche’s declaration was just a matter of pointing out the implication of this new weltanschauung. Existentialism arose as a philosophy dealing with existence in all of its physicality. Heidegger took on the mission in this framework to determine being, perhaps, if possible, eventually finding a way back to the gods, or god. Though he never openly said it, clearly his metaphysical-like writings were an attempt to find the nonphysical while trapped in a physical context.

Having found a way to deconstruct the physical I am now faced with trying to find the physical while trapped in a nonphysical context.

They are still indivisible complimentary-opposites of each other. The context has only been shifted to a phenomenalist context from an empirically material context. Try as one may, the phenomenalist argument can never be disproved:

Do we experience the thing-in-itself, or do we experience the phenomena of the thing? We can argue that the quantum reality is real but it involves mass on only a very small scale such that we never experience it, and thus we experience the thing-in-itself on a large scale only. But even then classical science presents us with a reality on an atomic scale that is very different from how we experience mass. We ‘assume’ that this discrepancy in how mass is structured and how we experience it all evens out such that we never experience it as it truly is (which is really the same as saying that we cannot experience the thing-in-itself, even though the empirical argument tries to say that we do).

Or we could argue that quantum reality, as strange as it is, is the reality of the thing-in-itself, and that we only experience the phenomena of the thing, never the thing-in-itself. Regardless of the sense of perception that is used----even touch-----we always experience the phenomena of the thing. We can’t escape that, it is always phenomena. In fact, even then, how we experience the phenomena is structured and defined by our own biology--- which, in the case of touch, is how the nerves are placed within our skin, and how those nerves send electrical signals to the brain.

The problem with phenomena is that it involves a mental construct, and a mental construct is by definition, nonphysical. Science is so dogmatic about materialism that it resorts to epiphenomenalism to prove that everything is material physicality, and that what we believe are mental constructs are in fact the result of physical processes, bioelectric reactions within neural structures----the conclusion of epiphenomenalism is that mental reality is in fact an illusion. Archephonemenalism is the complete opposite of epiphenomenalism and therefore holds that the phenomenalist or mental reality is not an illusion.

On a different note, for example, Archephenomenalism posits that we make decisions and choices and demonstrate free will through a mental process that is real. Epiphenonemanlism posits that it is only an illusion that we perform such processes.

Therefore do I even need to deconstruct the nonphysical having now placed it as the dominant side? Perhaps the phenomenal context and the physical reality we experience through that is sufficient. After all, I do not deny that physicality is a bona fide existential reality.

On the contrary the purpose here is to bring meaning back into the Modern World, responding to the part of the Modern Weltanschauung that is devoid of meaning. The Modern Age is built upon a foundation that Kant provided: That there can be no proof of metaphysical reality. He said that in order for there to be a bona fide metaphysics, we must be able to first demonstrate that there can be a synthetic a priori (in other words an a priori that is dependent on other natural a priori to be an a priori).

The Modern Age is therefore one of a metaphysical extreme as you said---the result of an often unspoken principle that only the physical exists. Therefore Derrida demonstrated that all of Western thought is centered around trying to find the missing Presence. The New Age, for example, is a symptom of this as it represents a parody of spirituality----a hodgepodge of once powerful spiritual motifs, stripped of their cultural context and molded together to create a fabricated meaning of what once was. Without the deeper spiritual value underlying all reality, everything, both animate and inanimate, has lost much, if not all, of its intrinsic value, and is therefore primarily valued based on an abstract market value.

The three principles which Archephenomenalism is based upon answer Kant’s problem by using the three basic a priori, space, time, and self. It is based largely on the 2nd Principle which states that physical reality exists only in the present---this is an a priori understanding of reality and its factuality is validated by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The 1st Principle is Descarte’s 1st Principle, I think therefore I am. And the 3rd Principle is the synthetic result of these two---that the mind is transcendent of physical reality because it is able to conceive of time beyond the present.

But if the present is the only point of physicality, then the superpositioned reality of the wave is therefore nonphysical. I know this is a radical concept and it shakes up modern ontology. Most people immediately want to reject it; after all there is a whole science around the measurement of waveform and the study of the wave. Even I have an old oscilloscope and love to hook it up to a Korg analog synthesizer and watch the wave patterns of the various sounds I can make. Of course it seems unscientific to define the wave as nonphysical.

But is it really unscientific? I challenge any scientist to show when, where, and how we perceive the wave qua wave, in other words, the wave-in-itself, or the wave purely as wave. It can only be perceived, measured, identified, or in any other way, experienced through decoherence----in other words a quantum collapse into a particle---a single position in space-time. The wave also represents non-relative time. It manifests as a particle only in the present moment (whether it is experienced by a sentient being or not) otherwise it is travelling through time. We cannot see it, nor in any way perceive it approaching us, because it is approaching us in the future (and we can only experience the present). It is non-relative because it takes the same amount of time for light to reach us from the sun, or to reach us from Jupiter, or a star 400 Million Light Years away. It doesn’t matter how our subjective experience stretches out, or shortens the time---it is still a constant and represents the actual passage of what we understand as time. And, as I said, only the present has physicality.

Hilbert space is another way of trying to make sense of the world we perceive, whether it is the world as it truly is or not. The problem with the math, which includes the symmetry of the universe, is that it does not present us with an arrow of time. Time, and the entropy of the universe, can go either way. One of the solutions that science offers is that the arrow of time is, coincidentally, a construct of the mind. I disagree, I believe that the historicity of an object (I am using Sartre’s definition here of historicity) is set in stone so to speak. In other words, Archephenomenalism, while stating that time does not exist as we understand it, still explains the arrow of time.

And yes----that is the point of Archephenomenalism----that we are reaching the limits of human perception.

 

The way to reconcile the physical and nonphysical is by using systems logic rather than traditional dualistic logics based on some variation of the excluded middle. That way even the logic itself of the mathematics can go down the toilet along with the law of identity and what is physical and nonphysical, real or imaginary, all simply depend upon the observer and how they choose to interpret the mathematics in any given context.

 

Hopefully I can obtain a copy when it is finished Quantum mechanics is on my future knowledge list.